The glazed lantern with its heraldic crest painted in verre églomisé on the door and combined with spherical feet and a fretted roof flowered with Gothic-quatrefoils, evolved from one invented in the 1750s by the antiquarian Horace Walpole (d.1779) with assitance from the designer/illustrator Richard Bentley (d.1782), for the entrance-hall staircase at Strawberry Hill, Middlesex (illustrated in C. Wainwright, The Romantic Interior, London, 1989, p.101, fig.81). This hall-lantern, with its Chinese umbrello'd or pagoda-swept roof and red japanning, is further enriched in the Gothic manner with a cusped ribbon-guilloche wreathing its hollowed plinth. Its eagle crest may have displaced that of Thomas Barrett (d.1803), who is likely to have commissioned the polychromed lantern for his Gothic entrance hall at Lee Priory, Kent, while the architect James Wyatt (d.1813) was aggrandising the Priory in the 1780s. In 1794 Barrett proudly announced to some visitors, "You will see a child of Strawberry prettier than the parent and so executed and so finished! and a Wyatt's taste". The lantern would have been manufactured by one of the leading tin-plate workers, such as Messrs. Spencer of Carnaby Market.
Ian Phillips who acquired this lantern along with the library, when Lee Priory was demolished in 1951, was a notable collector. Among the important pieces in his collection were the pair of Empire armchairs made by Georges and François-Honore-Georges Jacob after a design by Baron Dominique Vivant Denon for Thomas Hope's Egyptian Room at The Deepdene, Surrey, sold in these Rooms, 16 November 1995, lot 344.